Bush as Batman: A Summary

Powerful protector or Ominous oppressor?
 

Victim of his own success...

What price victory?
 

Good -vs- Evil

I find the whole Bush as Batman phenomenon quite interesting. I agree that Bush is Batman: He believes in good and evil and has earned nothing but opprobrium for relentlessly fighting the latter. Here are links to what I think are the two best articles on the subject.

Father Raymond J. de Souza doesn't compare the President to Batman in his National Post article, but he does set the stage for the debate. He places the movie's central theme in stark philosophical terms of not just a struggle between good and evil, but a struggle against the nihilism that says there is no such thing as good or evil:

This Batman comes with the bonus of some of the more combustible questions in philosophy. What is evil? Is there a moral order built into our world, or is to speak of such a moral design delusional?

Andrew Klavan makes the best case of Bush as Batman over at WSJ On-Line:

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them -- when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

When heroes arise who take those difficult duties on themselves, it is tempting for the rest of us to turn our backs on them, to vilify them in order to protect our own appearance of righteousness. We prosecute and execrate the violent soldier or the cruel interrogator in order to parade ourselves as paragons of the peaceful values they preserve. As Gary Oldman's Commissioner Gordon says of the hated and hunted Batman, "He has to run away -- because we have to chase him."

Despite the protestations of modern-day relativists, it is a good -vs- evil world.  Even the Hollywood fantasists stumble upon that truth every once in awhile.

Rock On, President Batman!